Seattle: Kurt Cobain, Coffee, Data Storage

When investors asked Kiran Bhageshpur whether his new tech startup meant he’d be moving back to Silicon Valley, he said no. Bhageshpur spent almost two decades in the Valley building business software before moving to Seattle, which he says has the ecosystem his latest venture needs. “This is the place with the upside,” he says, gazing at the Space Needle through his office window.

Bhageshpur’s year-old company, Igneous Systems, is among a wave of startups setting up shop in Seattle to grab a piece of the $36 billion global market for data storage, an industry that includes both the raw boxes of hard drives a business buys to store data and the software needed to manage it. Although companies such as Amazon.com have revolutionized storage by letting companies and individuals rent cloud capacity, private storage is selling faster than ever to businesses that don’t want to use another company’s computers. Venture funding for such startups has almost tripled in the last five years, to $1.6 billion, according to researcher CB Insights.